16 November 2013

15: toto

When I spent a summer in Tanzania, I lived in a big, empty house with four other law interns. I mean empty in the furniture sense - the house had a table and chairs and a credenza full of dishes and some beds and a couple of living room pieces and that was it. Most of the rooms felt cavernous.

One night we were all sitting around playing with my iPod (Wallace - since lost in the pit latrine in South Sudan {sob}), and somehow the song Africa by Toto came on.

I have no idea how the song Africa by Toto got onto my iPod, truly. I completely missed its era of popularity, which I can only assume occurred either before I was born or while I was actually living in Africa as a child, and I'm not sure I had even heard it before that summer of 2005. 

Nonetheless, we listened to it in our cavernous house in Tanzania, laughing because:

1. Kilimanjaro is not visible from the Serengeti.
2. "solitary company," really?

3. "I bless the rains down in Africa." WTF. 

Basically, this song makes no sense at all, and yet it will stick in your head for days.

Then today, someone posted this video on facebook, and I laughed out loud, repeatedly, because it points out over and over just how ridiculous the song is, and the song, it passes beyond ridiculous into absurd and idiotic: 

Steve Almond and Toto

Quotes worth your amusement: 

"in fact, he has a moral obligation whose looming presence he compares to a famous mountain rising like another famous mountain over a famous desert, although intriguingly the mountain in question does not actually rise above the desert in question because it is several hundred miles away." (Side note: the Serengeti is not a desert, Steve.)

"two: benevolence begins and ends in my imagination."

"it is the love child of imperialism and muzak."

But you can't get it out of your head now, can you?

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